Best image EXPORT settings for best quality

Question

What should i have my export settings at when exporting to a jump drive to give to clients for web and printing use???
When i see my images uploaded on Facebook for example, the qulity looks poor which worries me that when printing the quality will be poor as well. Am i missing something in the setting for exporting? What is the proper way to export for the best quality image? HELP!
My settings now under Aperture>Presets>Image Export:
JPG Original size
300 dpi

Answer 1

t_hall10 wrote:
The information provided was helpful, but did not completely answer my question...
Are there specific settings with-in Aperture I can set for exporting so that clients have the ability to print as wanted and post on the web as wanted whithout losing any major amount of photo quality?
No, not for one size fits all.
I do appreciate this may be a frustrating answer, but non-the-less, that's how it is.
t_hall10 wrote:
Should I be gving 2 folders of pictures, one for web use and one for printing use? If I were to do that, what should the exporting setting be set for both folders?
Maybe, it's your choice.
Let's go through the settings.
The only real quality setting is for JPG compression. 12 is virtually no (lossless) compression but gives huge file sizes which may breach a websites limits.
A 16MP images on quality 12 will be about 22MB. 11 brings it down to 8MB and 10 down to 7MB. You'd be very hard pressed to see the difference between a 12 and a 10. But if you want to feel you are giving the best quality without the extreme file size, go for 11.
The the vast majority of web sites, like facebook, will either resize uploaded images and/or re-compress them. They may also crop them to a different aspect ratio to fit their browser software.
Many report the best size for upload to facebook, for small images is 960 pixels on the long side. For large images it's 2048. For different websites it may be different. It is discussed on many photography sites and blogs. You will find some promoting the 960 / 2048, and others with their own preferences. Here's a good one which also shows you many ways FB will mess with the images:
http://havecamerawilltravel.com/photographer/images-photos-facebook-sizes-dimens ions-types
The safest colour space is sRGB (Mac profile: sRGB IEC61966-2.1) as it will more often be right than wrong. You should preview your images on screen with this profile to get a feel for how it will look and avoid unexpected colour shifts in your files. Ideally your screen should be calibrated so you know what you are giving them is accurate.
To understand the printing issue, try this exercise:
If you have a printer installed on your Mac, it probably also installed some printer profiles. In Aperture, look at one of your nicer vibrant images. From the view menu turn on 'Onscreen Proofing' and then from the 'Proofing Profile' sub menu, select one of your printer profiles and look at how the onscreen image changes. Repeat with each of the printing profiles and see how the image changes each time.
This is only a fraction of the colour shifts that will be occuring after you give your file to someone and they print it on their own uncalibrated system with their uncalibrated printer.
Many photographers don't offer full size images to their clients. They will usually give them smaller versions for their own use, which may include small size printing.
They will either do the main printing themself on their own calibrated printer, or work with a print shop, and may have installed calibrated profiles on their system for the shops printing equipment so they can use onscreen proofing to gauge what the pictures will look like when printed on that equipment.
But if you are just giving a file to someone, you lose all control of how they will print it. Even experienced photographers and computer users can struggle to make the prints match close to what they look like on screen.
Most often photos will appear too dark, or the colours look wrong, or it lacks sharpness. There are some settings on the export presets for gamma and blackpoint compensation. Gamma will brighten the image for when it's printing too dark, and blackpoint will try to stop the shadows turning black (within the chosen colour space). But as you don't know in advance whether the images are going to print too dark, or the shadows are turning black, you can't really set these for a one-size fits all scenario.
So there are not many settings to help you here.
You are actually moving into the realm of defining your product. You could, for example, ask the client which site they intend to publish the photos on, research that site and produce files optimized specifically for that site.
You also need to decide what size (resolution) files to give them for printing and whether you are happy giving away your full size images.
These choices will lead you to a number of a different files sizes as 'your product', all should be in sRGB colour space, and all with quality 10 or 11. For any client's who know how to make use of a wider clour space like Adobe RGB for printing, they will probably ask you up front to supply the print versions as such.
Next, for each size and usage, you now need to sharpen these images.
This is because sharpeing is best applied to images that have been resized to their intended output size and should be sharpened in accordance with how they will be viewed. Images displayed on computer screen generally need less sharpening than those that will be printed. Depening on the printer, the images may need some oversharpening in the file, in order to appear crisp and sharp in the print. As you won't be controlling the printing process you should probably avoid oversharpening. The bottom line is, if people are taking on the task of their own printing, they'll need to figure out what they are doing to get good results, or use a commercial printer.
Andy